Quotes from Anais Nin

Es cierto, como dice Hugo, que yo llevo mis pensamientos y especulaciones al diario y que él sólo es consciente del dolor que puedo causarle cuando ocurre algún incidente. Sin embargo, yo soy su diario. Sólo es capaz de pensar en voz alta conmigo o a través mío.

when one is doing a work of imagination, one becomes completely absorbed in it, and that it becomes difficult to come out into the world and participate in it

É monstruoso dizer-se que o artista não serve a humanidade. Ele foi os olhos, os ouvidos, a voz da humanidade. Sempre foi o transcendentalista que passava a raios X os nossos verdadeiros estados de alma.

I always try to soften what happened by understanding.

So I'm sad. I throw my vanity aside. I'm questioning myself. If the day on which you happen to read this letter proves to be one in which you're depressed, I know I'll get one kind of answer. Another day another.

Life's problems were too limited, that it was a pity, that the function of the artist was to increase these problems, to cause upheavals in the brain, to make people wild and free so that there would be more drama to their lives.

Anaïs, beware of enlargement, exaggeration and dramatization. Beware of associating the bad weather, a tactless work, a rebuttal letter, a rejection, with a total picture for despair. You have courage, but this courage is severely strained by your enlargement of the obstacles and the way you hurl yourself against them as if your life depended on it.

I don't rave against politics. I ignore it.

Strange that when we finally fly, the separation from the past seems easier to achieve. Height and distance from the earth seem to stabilize the spirit, to liberate it from its sorrow. We enter the consciousness of the cosmos.

Oh, God, today I pray [to] you on my knees for Dostoevsky's obscurity, blindness, the most sacred and precious of all things.

Most diverse clientele—chiefly negroid: trap drummers, dancers, ham actors, pimps, whores, gamblers, fairies. Like Harlem almost. The conversations are rich. Unimaginable! I find all this so much more appetizing than cháteaus and churches. Human beings! Not relics.

Don't wait for it," I said. "Create a world, your world. Alone. Stand alone. Create. And then the love will come to you, then it comes to you. It was only when I wrote my first book that the world I wanted to live in opened to me." "I feel doomed to

She laughed when he trailed his phrases like southern vines, or practiced sudden exaggerated severities as children do when they play charades of the father's absurd arrogances, of the mother's hot-house exudations of charm.

I find that I do not know what to believe, that I have not decided yet whether analysis simplifies and undramatizes our existence, or whether it is the most subtle, the most insidious, the most magnificent way of making dramas more terrible, more maddening.

Great idea on the arrangement of my work. It will make a difference to me to disentangle certain passages, bring certain phrases in relief, help me to find my own bearings. The literalness is not to be attributed to the high and noble reasons I gave you (all that stuff on Rimbaud, metaphysical-artistic imperatives), just sheer laziness, between you and me.

I need your letters, as human assertions of reality.

El placer anormal anula el gusto por el normal.

Lost her taste in life and blindly expects me to give it back to her. We talk as people do in books. Strange, brittle, arrowed. Tall, tall windows covered with lace. Pillows under our feet. And life tasteless. And so eager, so eager that I should accomplish a miracle. People always expect miracles.

You must not get trapped in humanity and its struggles. You must keep alive your contact with all things, your relationships to all kinds of people. When you are too much invaded by others' discords, when you are driven by scruples or guilt to retrogress in order to help others live, and when they try to crystallize you in one role, you lose your ability to maintain and sustain the flow, you arrest the turning of the bigger wheels, you get caught in the spokes.

I smoke, get up, move about. I cannot bear my own company. I have not learned yet to replace introspection by thinking. I could meditate on Spengler, for instance, but in ten minutes I am again devouring myself.

In the evening we are taken to see Rain. I discover Joan Crawford. I think you told me you loved her. So do I. Her face haunts me. The dream-like exaggeration of features, the big mouth, the mouth. The story is ridiculous. The French are jeering. Absolutely jeering and there is almost a scene. The Americans are weeping. Joan Crawford as slut and as angel . . . magnificent.

But if every day we become aware of greater and deeper tangles, greater and deeper and more diabolical difficulties, why I can only see the birth of greater and deeper books, that's all. [. . .]

Henry, I'm afraid of the adulation I'm getting. Be severe with me. Don't let me get spoiled. I knew I should live alone as I did before. It is good for one.

Send for the doctor! I need a medicine man who will solder my body and soul together, which splits at every separation. The doctor says it is the flu. He cannot see the body is empty, the fire is gone, I am king without kingdom, and artist without a home, a stranger to luxury, to power, to bigness, to comfort. I lost a world, a small human world of love and friendship. I am not adventurer, I miss my home, familiar streets, those I love and know well.